The increase in recent years of illegal and highly dangerous activities by terrorist groups has created serious problems for law enforcement agencies. One of the most difficult circumstances to handle is that in which a group of armed individuals takes a number of victims hostage and attempts to use the hostages as protection and leverage to obtain transportation to a point of refuge.
A typical example of such a case is presented when a group of hostage takers kidnaps and holds, at gunpoint, a group of hostages and demands of a governmental agency that they be provided with an aircraft and crew and be flown, together with the hostages, to some remote location at which the hostage takers are, or believe they are, welcome. In such case it is obviously important to rescue the hostages and deactivate the hostage takers before they enter the aircraft, and it is not always possible to simply refuse the demands with the hope that the hostage takers are bluffing. Furthermore, it is frequently the case that the demands are made while the hostages and hostage takers are concealed in a protected location near or at an airport. It therefore becomes apparent that there will be a very limited interval of time in which the hostage takers are exposed, namely, that interval in which they are passing between a protected position such as a hanger or other building and the aircraft.
However, during that interval it can be expected that the hostages will be held at gunpoint and that any evidence of efforts to stop the proceedings will result in one or more of the hostages being killed or seriously injured, an unacceptable situation. Thus, while it would be possible to position groups of expert marksmen in suitable locations so that the hostage takers could be shot while passing between the building and the aircraft, there is no reliable technique for guaranteeing that all of the marksmen will be able to eliminate all of the hostage takers before one or more of the hostage takers can fire shots at the hostages. While it would seem possible to establish a moment in time when all of the marksmen would commence firing, that approach is not usually practical because it cannot always be predicted when the optimum exposure of the hostages will occur. It would also seem to be possible to equip groups of marksmen, which can be termed "fire teams", with radios so that a voice command to commence firing can be given from a central control location. There is, however, no reliable quick way for the person at the central control location to know when an adequate number of marksmen in the fire teams have good sight pictures of their assigned hostage takers. Thus, if the fire command is given when a hostage taker is not in the sights of any marksman, that hostage taker would be capable of inflicting severe damage on the hostages as soon as he is alerted by the commencement of fire against the others.
The foregoing example is, of course, only one of many possibilities and is presented only to illustrate some of the difficulties and considerations facing a law enforcement or military group given the most difficult and sensitive task of accomplishing a rescue of this type.
There are also various other situations in which simultaneous firing control of a number of weapons may be deemed necessary, but no effort will be made herein to expound on other possibilities.